Heroin-related overdose deaths more than doubled in 2013 over 2012 in Boulder County, according to death statistics, and both police and treatment professionals are braced for 2014 to be worse.

According to the Boulder County Coroner's Office, 14 people died of heroin overdoses in Boulder County through November. Data for the rest of the year is still pending. Six people died of heroin overdoses in both 2011 and 2012. The spike in deaths point to a surge in use of the drug that can quickly claim the lives of users.

"Every heroin addict I have talked to has started their addiction with pills," said Longmont Special Enforcement Unit Sgt. Sean Harper.

Naloxone hydrochloride is used to treat overdoses of narcotics such as heroin. The drug inhibits the body s opiate receptors and allows respiration to resume.
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Matthew Jonas
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The SEU investigates drug crimes in Longmont, often working with the Boulder County Drug Task Force, state officials, and federal agents on broad drug ring investigations. Heroin commerce so far hasn't risen to organized rings in Longmont, Harper said, with most local users making regular -- even daily -- trips to Denver to buy the highly addictive opiate. Investigators believe most of the heroin locally is coming into the U.S. from Honduras and Mexico.

"It is dirty," Harper said. "It is just a really dirty, nasty drug. Some of these people are dying with the needle in their arm. This is how fast it happens."

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In a state focused on the legalization of marijuana, Harper and treatment professionals said heroin has been making a comeback in the past two years. In that time, users addicted to prescription medications like Vicodin and other opiate painkillers have turned to street drugs as the pills became reformulated to discourage a high, more carefully prescribed and increasingly expensive.

Widd Medford, intensive services program manager at Boulder County's Addiction Recovery Center, and Carol Helwig, communicable disease control coordinator for Boulder County Public Health, said the face of heroin addition might surprise many. Addicts are getting younger and are more affluent than the general public might expect, primarily because they are trying the drug after using the prescription drugs.

Medford said some get addicted young because they were injured in high school or college-level sports and doctors prescribed the pills for pain.

"Once the pain is gone there is still that euphoric effect that heroin and painkillers can have on the brain," he said.

Widd Medford, Widd Medford, intensive services program manager at Boulder County s Addiction Recovery Center, talks about heroin usage in Boulder County on Monday. To see a video go to www.timescall.com.
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Matthew Jonas
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The ARC has tracked a notable increase in admissions to its heroin detoxification program. From July 1, 2010, until June 31, 2011, less than 2 percent of total admissions were related to heroin. From July 2012 through Dec. 31, 2012, in half the time, admits jumped up to 6.5 percent.

The ARC has a program that provides recovering addicts with Suboxone, a drug that helps addicts fight the need for heroin, that started in April 2011. From the opening of the program until September 2013, 35 people were treated through the program, but Medford said demand is exceeding the capacity of the program. In fiscal year 2012, 41 people inquired about the program, in 2013, 69 people inquired, and from July through December 2013, 78 people sought admission.

Brown heroin such as this has been found by law enforcement officials in Boulder County.
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Matthew Jonas
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Helwig monitors the county's needle exchange program, which seeks to help addicts by providing clean needles to help reduce the risks of abscesses and the transmission of blood-borne diseases that can be shared through used needles. She said the mean age of participants has dropped from 42.6 years old in 2008 to 30.2 years old in 2013. The demand for the needles also has increased notably in the past four years. In 2010, the program had 149 participants and in 2013 that spiked to 452 users.

One of those users, now 22, found his way to the Suboxone program at its inception because he had been seeking clean needles through the health department.

The man, who asked to remain anonymous because heroin possession and use is criminal and because of the ongoing social stigma, has been clean for a year and a half. He moved from Boulder County to Fort Collins to take himself out of the environment where he developed an addiction to heroin so bad that he was shooting the drug into his arms up to 10 times a day. Like so many others, he started by using prescription pills, something he and his friends did for fun as teenagers.

"I was a rich kid with too much money," he said.

Heroin, at that time, wasn't even on his radar.

"I didn't even really know about it," he said. "It was something that homeless people used; it was a really nasty drug that I didn't know about."

He and his friends used Vicodin and OxyContin, which he started using at age 15. Over the course of three years, that habit developed into a heroin addiction that he took great pains to hide. His parents, he said, still don't know about it.

"I just wore long-sleeved shirts and I used makeup to cover it up," he said of track marks, although Harper noted that some users inject in more subtle places -- like between toes -- to cover their use. "Nobody had a clue other than my friends I was using with."

Even a friend overdosing in his home when he was 19 barely slowed him down.

"His face just turned blue. He was on the couch and he just stopped breathing," he said. "It was really scary."

He said it was the scariest moment of his life.

"I took some water and splashed it on his face," he said Friday, recounting his experience. "I put him on the ground and called 911."

His friend was not breathing and he performed CPR as dispatchers guided him through it for about 10 minutes until paramedics arrived, pushed him aside, and used a drug called naloxone hydrochloride, which inhibits the body's opiate receptors and allows respiration to resume.

His friend lived.

In 2011, he heard of the Suboxone program.

"I was like, 'Please, please, please get me in right now. I am so sick and tired of this lifestyle,'" he said, noting that the program hadn't launched yet. "I tried to get in that day because I wanted to get in so bad. I kept calling them and telling them, 'Please, get back to me. I want to get clean.'"

The detoxification was two days of excruciating pain, he recalled. He said it was a miracle he did not walk out.

"Heroin is like, it feels like the best thing in the whole world. It is, in my opinion, it is something no human should be able to experience because it feels that good," he said.

Withdrawal is the exact opposite, he said.

Heroin is so lethal, Harper said, because purity levels on the street can vary wildly.

"You don't know the potency of what you are going to get," she said.

In November, the ARC launched a new program to provide reversal kits to addicts who agree to attend a short training session. The kits include intramuscular needles and naloxone hydrochloride that can be used to help save fellow users who overdose. As of Monday, 25 users had been trained and the kits had been used on the streets twice to reverse heroin overdoses.

Helwig said both reversals were from overdoses caused by the same batch of heroin.

She added that the kits include lower doses of the drug that paramedics use, which means that it doesn't immediately send the person receiving the dose into withdrawal.

"They don't get dope sick instantly," she said.

Medford said he and others in the treatment sector are bracing for more and more clients in 2014 as prescription pill addicts continue to make the jump to street heroin.

"What gives me inspiration is people do recover," he said. "People do get well."

The man who moved to Fort Collins is now married and works to keep his heroin addiction a secret so the stigma doesn't sabotage other parts of his life.

"I definitely thought I was special and I wasn't going to get addicted," he said.

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